


The Weight

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:22:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22206310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "I don’t see this anywhere else but I want it badly. Jack, instead of being all happy and honored that everyone suddenly likes him now that he’s a guardian, is angry and upset that he was ignored for hundreds of years, except with the whole Bunny hating him for blizzards on Easter thing. I want to leave this as open as possible, but just angry, hurt Jack and preferably guilty Bunnymund that ends with some cute or fluff or relationship stuff."Jack’s anger gets so heavy that he can’t fly. Bunny finds him walking, and tries to persuade him to come back to the Warren to work things out.
Relationships: E. Aster Bunnymund/Jack Frost
Comments: 2
Kudos: 105
Collections: JackRabbit Short Fics





	The Weight

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 7/13/2015.

It feels heavy, like a lead weight just under his heart. He doesn’t know how to get rid of it, and he’s not sure he wants to. No one’s given him a good reason to get rid of it, yet.  
  
Jack knows well enough what it is, this leaden feeling. It’s his anger at being left alone for so long, his anger that he was only noticed when he did something that caused problems for someone else. He thinks of the yetis keeping him out of the Pole, Tooth’s fairies mobbing him when he crossed their paths—maybe they had liked his teeth the whole time, but they had never acted like they wanted to see him until he was chosen as a Guardian—and Bunny raging at him for Easter blizzards. Sandy—well, Sandy had just not bothered to talk to him personally. He’d never gotten angry at Jack, at least, but maybe that was just because he knew Jack couldn’t interfere with the dreamsand, no matter what he did. And so he could be safely ignored.  
  
That hurt. From all of them, for three hundred years, that hurt. Even their friendliness hurt now, as if they were asking Jack to forget most of his own existence. As if becoming a Guardian had changed him entirely from who he had been.  
  
Before becoming a Guardian, the weight of his anger had been far outweighed by sadness and loneliness—he’d barely noticed it. But now, after Jamie and his other believers had lifted those other weights so entirely, he discovered that they couldn’t even touch the anger weight. And why should they? That weight wasn’t there because of anything they had done.  
  
He hadn’t realized it could get heavier, though. Whenever he spent time with another Guardian and he didn’t mention it, whenever someone asked him what was wrong and his answer wasn’t the weight of his anger, the weight in his chest increased.  
  
But it wasn’t a real weight, was it?  
  
It starts getting heavier when he thinks about it and about the Guardians not knowing about it. There’s a problem here, he knows, that he wants the Guardians to ask him about something he’s been so careful to hide. But then again, how can they _not_ know? How? Those thoughts add weight quickly.  
  
When he questions whether sincere apologies from the Guardians would help lessen it at all, it becomes substantial enough that he can no longer fly on the wind. He shouts at nothing, and even though he’s beginning to feel that this shouldn’t increase the weight of his anger at the Guardians, it grows anyway.  
  
Bunny finds Jack trudging through the woods, leaving icy footprints on the spring growth. “I suppose you’re here to yell at me about spoiling your perfect Spring,” Jack says. “Go on, you probably missed it. Just another thing to do, right? Something to break up the monotony, year after year. Some rage, some hate. Just a pastime. Or do you really hate me, and this Guardian thing really rankles you? Or do you just not care about me at all? I’ve got to make a whole storm to be noticed, and you know what? Even as a Guardian, I’m always the one coming to you and everybody! You don’t care about me, not really, now that it’s not a crisis anymore.”  
  
“Well, I was going to start with ‘hello’,” Bunny says. “Where’s this all coming from? I thought you were a lot happier now. Are you acting like this to your believers?”  
  
“NO! They never shut me out for centuries, they don’t yell at me, they don’t just assume they don’t need to apologize for anything, they don’t treat me like they’d forget me if I stopped pestering them!”  
  
“Have you been this angry for the whole past year? When all of us Guardians see you more than we ever see each other? And you never said anything?”  
  
“Pardon me for hoping that at least one of the Guardians of all childhood would recognize that when you ignore someone for three hundred years, it doesn’t just go away after one weekend! And, no I haven’t been this angry the whole year, I’ve been getting angrier and angrier, and now I’m so angry I can’t even fly! And what do you mean I see you Guardians more than anyone else? I barely see everyone over the course of a couple months.”  
  
“We’ll come back to that one,” says Bunny. “Look, you’re too mad to fly right now, but are you too angry to fall?”  
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
“Going to the Warren, that’s what. You can yell all you want, there, and I deserve at least some of it.”  
  
“No! No one can hear me here, and I’ll frost up this forest if I want!” Jack waves his arms and some of the buds on the trees ice over.  
  
“But is that what you actually want? And do you want to be out in the world when you’re not feeling your center at _all_?  
  
Jack kicks at the ground. “All I want is to be able to fly again. And I want people to know I’m angry, but then I might be less angry, so what’s the point? And apologies might not help and I’m just going to be grounded forever because no one could figure out that they should say something about the way they treated me!”  
  
“Yeah, or maybe we could start working this out. Look, Jack, if I apologize for some of the things I’ve done, and I do that right now, that may help, but I want you to get everything out, so I can make a better apology. And I think you might need different things than the rest of the Guardians do—or think we do. But what’s not going to help is going off on your own. Anyway, I’d like you to come back to the Warren so that I feel safe about shouting back.”  
  
“Why should I care? And why should you shout? You—you should be quiet, because it’s my turn to shout, and if you can shout back, maybe you’re saying I’m not—not justified, and…”  
  
Bunny tilts his head. “You should care if you want to maybe be friends after this is over. And I might shout because I can be volatile and you can press my buttons when you want. And, hell, maybe it is true that not one hundred percent of your anger is justified. But if you can’t even fly because of it, clearly it’s not so easy letting it go. So let’s go back to the Warren, all right? And I do want you to be able to fly out afterwards. I’m going to try really hard to make that happen.”  
  
Bunny taps his foot on the ground and jumps into the hole that appears.  
  
“But why aren’t you angrier with me right now?!” Jack shouts after him.  
  
“Come find out!” Bunny calls.  
  
And Jack does.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> bowlingforgerbils said: I really like how you describe Jack’s anger here. It feels very real, the emotions he’s expressing.


End file.
